Ashton Kutcher Beats CNN to 1,000,000 Twitter Followers

Ashton Kutcher, a well-known actor, best known for his role as Michael Kelso in the hit series, "That '70s Show", and for his own show "Punk'd", where he pranks celebrities, has defeated television news channel CNN to one million Twitter Followers. When Kutcher, Twitter screen name: aplusk, first made the challenge to CNN, Twitter screen name: cnnbrk, about a week ago, he was about 60,000 followers behind at 820,000 followers to the 880,000 followers that CNN had. But Kutcher's followers were growing much more rapidly, garnering lots of support. Kutcher took the lead at 982,000 followers and even had a 1,500 lead until CNN started advertising on their news channel and retook the lead at 990,000 followers. Ashton then retook the lead back 30 minutes later at 993,000 and officially reached 1 million followers first on April 16 at 11:13 PST. With this victory, Ashton Kutcher becomes the most followed person on Twitter.

What makes this challenge so bizarre is that before Ashton made this challenge, the CNN Twitter page was not even owned by the company, but owned by James Cox, who made the account and has been maintaining it. A day after the challenge, CNN had taken control over the account for an "undisclosed sum" and later reported that James Cox was signed to a consultant contract agreement.

Ashton Kutcher and wife Demi Moore are known as the first Twitter celebrity couple because they signed on to Twitter before many of the other celebrities did. They are also loyal tweeters who spend most of their time on that site. For those who don't know what Twitter is, it is a social networking site, free of charge, where users can write updates or reply to anyone, and also follow and even talk to their favorite celebrities. Tweets can only have a maximum of 140 characters in length. Twitter has grown over 1000% in popularity, the past year, five times more than Facebook.

EA (Electronic Arts) Sports, a supporter of Kutcher, promised that if Kutcher was to win the challenge, they would give the 1,000,000th follower every single game that comes out this year made by EA for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii, as well as a role in the new Sims 3 game. Kutcher has said in a YouTube video that if he was to win this challenge, he would "Ding Dong Ditch" CNN creator Ted Turner's house and put it on the web for everyone to see. A "Ding Dong Ditch" is when you ring someone's door bell and run away. Now that Kutcher has won, we will see how this turns out. Kutcher has also promised to give $100,000 to the Malaria No More Fund to fight the Malaria Disease.

Congratulations to Ashton Kutcher on this monumental victory! We are all a part of history and we all made it happen! What's next for Ashton? First to 2 million?